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Monday, November 24, 2008

Our Customer Support organization has a great post out on How to Setup Anti-Spam in Exchange 2007 When Using a Mail Hosting Company. They key to note here is that if you are using one of our DNS partners and have left the Dynamic DNS client on, there is a registry change you have to do in order to not have to update your DNS records after the Dynamic DNS client updates them again.

If you’re using a 3rd party anti-spam service (which totally frees up your bandwidth for more useful traffic), I highly recommend reading this post.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

We all (hopefully) by now know about the SBS 2008 Document Library up on Technet. which has links to product help and whitepapers and all sorts of goodness related to the SBS 2008 product. We also all know this has been growing over time as the User Assistance writers create more and more documentation.

Did you know that you can add to the documentation, your experience, extra pieces of information you’ve discovered. That’s right, the SBS documentation is just a solid foundation to get you going, you can update the documentation to include added pieces of information as well. If there is one thing I’ve learned, is you are never alone in trying to do something. If you want to do something, chances are there is someone else on the Internet wanting to do the exact same thing!

Let me show you an example; I was looking for the information to manually configure a domain name. (I happen to know this is in the pipe to be published, but isn’t yet), and you come across this documentation on how to set up your Internet address. As you can see at the bottom, I’ve added information on how to configure the domain name manually, linking to the Official SBS Blog. You might want to add something to this same post. Say you’re working with a domain name provider that has particularly tricky UI, and you had to call support to figure out how to navigate it. Why not click the Add New Content link and type that up, so others can benefit?

Just look for the community Content section, and click Add New Content

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

OneCare made a big announcement today to adjust the Microsoft solutions to ensure more customers are getting the essential protection they need. If you are a OneCare subscriber, there is no action to take at this time.

Q: How does this impact Windows Small Business Server 2008 (part of the Windows Essentials Server Solutions offerings) and Windows Live OneCare for Server?

A: Microsoft will continue to support the 120 day trial for Windows Live OneCare for Server offered in SBS 2008. The subscription service will be available for purchase through June 30, 2009. Microsoft will ensure Windows Live OneCare for Server subscribers will remain protected for the duration of their trials and subscriptions. For language and market availability please see http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/editions-overview.aspx.

Q. Didn’t you announce at the Windows Small Business Server 2008 beta that Windows Live OneCare for Server would be offered as a trial on SBS 2008?

A. Yes we did and in some cases the new Windows Small Business Server 2008 will ship with a Windows Live OneCare for Server trial (please see http://www.microsoft.com/sbs/en/us/editions-overview.aspx for language and market availability). This announcement does not affect the trial at this time. Microsoft will continue to support the 120 day trial for Windows Live OneCare for Server currently offered in SBS 2008. The subscription service will be available for purchase through June 30, 2009. Microsoft will ensure Windows Live OneCare for Server subscribers will remain protected for the duration of their trials and subscriptions.

If you have questions on the OneCare solution, please level them as comments on the original announcement.

If you missed the launch of the Dream Server, you can probably still catch the recorded sessions. I wanted to take a moment to shout out to our ISVs who did a lot of work during the development phases of SBS 2008 to make sure that you had such wonderful options for additional software and services that works well with Small Business Server. Below is the ISV launch badge, which are the ISVs that responded to use with fully functional software or services that works with the feature sets of SBS. This list can only grow from this day forward.

I know beyond the list above there are other solutions that also work with SBS 2008. Remember the golden rule. SBS runs on top of Windows Server 2008, so if the software is certified to run on Windows Server 2008, it’ll most likely run on SBS 2008. Want more detail? Just consult the catalog.

Monday, November 17, 2008

I may be a little out of the norm with Home Server, but I have a home network with 2 subnets. The reason is because I run a Sonicwall as my home router. The wired LAN runs in 192.168.1.x and the wireless WLAN runs in 192.168.2.x . This allows me to do guest wireless, and quite frankly, a business class router such as a Sonicwall just provides much more reliability, which is very important to me.

Ok, so now for how I got my WLAN clients to access the home server. First of all, Home Server has a dynamic IP address, so because I’m a server guy, I just changed it to a static IP address on the LAN for the Sonicwall. Next I went into the Windows Firewall on the Home Server

For each exception, I needed to verify that it allowed more than the Class-C subnet through the firewall. I decided for simplicity, it was easier to change it from a class-C to a class-B subnet allowance (i.e. instead of 192.168.1.x through the firewall, it allows 192.168.x.x through the firewall). This is slightly less secure, but it’s my home, and I have a pretty good WPA key on my wireless network.

Here are the steps to change each exception:

Select an Exception, you’ll have to do this for all exceptions that are scoped to My Network (subnet) only, and choose Edit.

On the Change Scope page, select Custom List, and place your cursor in the box

For the subnet, type the static IP address of the server followed by a “/” and then the subnet for class-B networks (e.g. “192.168.1.2/255.255.0.0”) and choose OK.

That’s one exception that allows the WLAN clients into the home server. Now go through all the exceptions and make this change, the WLAN clients just “popped” online without making a change on the client side.

Magesh, the man responsible for SBS 2008 Remote Web Workplace, SharePoint and other i-Worker type features has made his debut on TechNet Edge. This video will talk about such things like the SBS remote access gadget, the connection to your desktop computer remotely, how to configure RWW, as well as what you can access on your SharePoint website.

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

Today, the SBS team has released some more languages to the manufacturing department. With only one more wave of localized versions to come, today we released: Chinese, Korean, Czech and Russian. I’d suspect anywhere from 1-5 months after today. We can’t control the fill of the channels.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

If I think back to the User Group tours we did this year, there were oodles of questions on the new backup application included with SBS 2008. To answer a lot of questions about the new SBS 2008 backup application, the Official SBS blog has Introducing SBS 2008 Backup.